


Sating the Shadows

by JazzRaft



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-20
Updated: 2020-01-20
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:14:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22338355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JazzRaft/pseuds/JazzRaft
Summary: Once a week, Cor gets himself a drink. Sometimes, he has company.
Relationships: Titus Drautos | Glauca & Cor Leonis
Comments: 4
Kudos: 13





	Sating the Shadows

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a request on [tumblr!](https://jazzraft.tumblr.com/post/190370297652/hi-there-youre-one-of-my-favorite-writers-and-i)

For two hours a week, once a week, Cor let himself drink.

It wasn’t his choice, really. If it was up to him, he’d be spending the night doing something more productive with his time. He’d be overseeing recruitment, honing the next line of defense in this war. He’d be training himself after the lights went out, taking advantage of the silence to better hone his sword to defend the Crown.

But when said Crown had once all but _ordered_ him to “just take it easy,” it would be insubordinate for Cor to refuse. So, two hours, one day, he went and got himself a drink. Sometimes two, just to fill the time.

Most times, he had company to pass the other glass to.

“Drinking alone again, Leonis?”

Drautos never announced himself. He merely appeared, like an iron giant risen from the earth. A mass of steely shadow pressed from the darkness, cleaving into the stool next to Cor. The first thing he did was look at the whiskey, the amber alcohol turning red under the brimstone light. Tonight, he didn’t drink it.

“Rough night again, Commander?” Cor countered.

It was always a rough night for Commander Drautos. That was abundantly evident by the humorless grunt given in response. Nevertheless, the close stillness of the bar was a condoling pat on each of their shoulders.

It was a modest little place Cor remembered from when Noctis used to work the sushi shack. A comfortable enough space to retreat within when discretion was preferable to the Prince’s outrage at being followed during his rebellion into independence. It had been a long time since Cor needed to fret about Noct’s safety in the wild, working world of Insomnia, but he’d remembered the bar as a pleasant enough refuge from his worries.

Modern and quiet, with low orange lights and smoke trails drifting beneath the ceiling, Cor was always welcomed to just the right balance of solitude and company. The patrons were usually regulars, ghosts haunting the dark, scarred booths and regaling the walls with storied echoes of “the good ol’ days.” Ancient glories of fights won and lost murmured from the smoking lips of strangers throughout the shadowy cove.

While Cor had plenty of his own tales to send up with the smoke clouds, he found himself a solitary stool at the end of the bar and kept his own counsel until Drautos materialized. The bartender was a weathered woman in her fifties, with fair hair turning fairer gray and wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. Her smile was patient and her drinks timely. Cor asked her to leave the bottle.

Glass scraped softly across the oak. Whiskey washed a ruddy red. Smoke fogged the air between them. Drautos breathed it in like oxygen.

“Long night,” he said.

Cor didn’t know if that was his way of clarifying the necessity of a stiff drink – not that Cor ever asked for a reason – or just his way of starting a conversation. Neither of them were much for small talk, Drautos even less so than Cor. Decades of proximity to the royals and their Council had allowed Cor to adapt at least a few cues for social conduct to his every day vocabulary.

But Drautos had always been distant from Insomnia’s shining seat. The Kingsglaive: the shadows cast from the light of the King’s brilliance. The silent watchers in the dark, with their own language between themselves. The tang of steel and rush of sparks kept little space for the decorous subtleties of “small talk.” Drautos stated his point like a command, bringing Cor’s attention to the world outside.

“The longest,” he agreed.

Never had a night been so dark. The blackness cluttered close to the windows, like fingers pushing against the glass, yearning to reach the warm light within. Yet the old walls of the bar stood solid against the oncoming dark, an impregnable shelter keeping its affable phantoms safe within.

“That why you’re in here, rather than out there.”

Cor knew that Drautos intended it as a question, but the dry, motionless tone of his voice made everything sound as if he were stating a fact. As if he didn’t need to ask Cor why he chose his own solitude over the company of others. As if he knew him too well to even ask.

Cor wished that he knew Drautos just as well. But in the end, the most he ever knew about him was his favorite brand of whiskey.

“Thought you’d be out there, too,” Cor replied. “And yet, you’re here.”

“I go where you go, Leonis.”

It hadn’t always been that way. Times were that Cor could stalk into that old bar in Insomnia and never know if the commander would appear to scowl over the week’s casualty reports. They used to be separate, colleagues, not quite friends, but nevertheless, brothers in arms. Brothers bound beneath the cause of the Crown. Cor used to think they had two, unshakeable things in common: their taste in whiskey, and their loyalty to Lucis.

“My loyalty is to my country,” Drautos had told him once, far away in that smoky bar.

Now, Cor had no idea who he’d been talking to that night. Titus Drautos had been a memory long before Insomnia fell. Knowing what he did now, it could have been General Glauca making that vow. Knowing what he knew now, Cor had no idea when Titus Drautos stopped coming to that bar.

He was Cor’s shadow now, always at his heels. He walked where he walked, fought where he fought, watched him where he drank. Cor didn’t know if his shadow even was Drautos. When he closed his eyes, it looked like him. He looked like the sharp, stern face of the Kingsglaive Commander, all pinched wrinkles drawn over an iron-hard jaw. Cor remembered shrewd, stony eyes, as impenetrable as the cold, chrome walls of a Magitek fortress.

When he opened his eyes, it was only ever that suit of armor that was sitting next to him. And he wondered when the man he remembered had vanished into the machine the Empire made. He wondered why he kept coming to that bar. An automated function? A glitch in the system?

Cor raked his brain for a decade since, looking for the answer. He looked for where the switch happened, he looked for what he could have said that cost him everything he’d sworn to defend. Had it been him that killed Regis? Had it been the wrong word said over casual drinks at that smoky downtown bar? Had he given something away, had he betrayed his king without ever knowing?

But no matter how hard he tried to remember, Cor couldn’t think of a single thing he could have said that would have been of any use to General Glauca. All he’d ever said had been for Titus Drautos.

So who kept coming to that bar in Insomnia? Why?

“Daemons belong in the dark,” Drautos said now. “Shouldn’t be here.”

His hand rested beside his untouched drink, dark as blood in the light. Cor couldn’t tell if he saw the calloused fingers of his old friend, or the savage glint of Glauca’s gauntlet. Who was this man sitting next to him, in this Lestallum substitute of a place he couldn’t return to?

Cor finished his drink, leaving the second glass full of blood on the bar. He paid his tab and walked outside, taking his shadow with him. He returned to the world which Glauca had wrought. The sky was starless, black flakes of ash a constant rain between the alleys. The city was silent, the chittering of daemons echoing in the places where the floodlights couldn’t reach.

He kept waiting to see that helm in the darkness. He kept waiting for Glauca to rise from his shadow. But it was only ever Drautos he felt at his back.

Who was the man who haunted him, throughout this world of darkness?

Had he ever really known.


End file.
